Category: Old-Site

The weekend cometh… and not a freakin’ moment too soon. You can hit a point sometimes where you just feel – SCREW this. I don’t want to do this monkey-ass work anymore and by damn I might just stop doing it. Permanently.

And then you say yeah, you’re available to come in for 6 hours overtime on Saturday, and yeah, you’ll be there bright and early…

It’s time and a half though, so I’m just gonna keep thinking these mere few hours that I’d otherwise likely spend sleeping and squinting blurrily at Slashdot in my dressing gown will buy me a shiny new 200Gig SATA hard drive…

Or 7,600 penny chews. Either/Or.

In other work related news, I’ve asked about changing departments and that looks like it might well become an actuality… I’ll be moving from the droll and everyday System Integration and Test to the breathtaking and dynamic SUB-System Integration and Test…. Oh yah… You know it.

And what is the end result of this monumental epoch shift you might (possibly) wonder? Less software testing and hardware config. More scripting and software config.

So if the goal is to become a developer in the next year or two, I’m definitely moving in the right direction, as the software config in SSIT is along the more complex side of things, and suitably tech to be a challenge rather than a chore. This is all, of course, in theory.

Throwing some Caribou (changed from Manitoba and link to manitoba.fm – 07/01/2011) on and having a couple of bevs to chill the fuck out and take my mind off work seems like a really good idea about now… So I will. The “Up In Flames” album is spot-on… pretty chilled, but very interesting sound and textures to the whole thing… Looking at reviews shows people saying what an enormous disparity Up In Flames is to his previous album Keep Breaking My Heart, but really I don’t see it. Sure, the previous one is harder edged and more techno (in the nicest possible sense of the word) than UIF, but it’s not like he’s got multiple personalities… you can see the same underlying approach and style shine clearly through each… It’s just a matter of what kinda mood you’re in and what you fancy. A place for everything and everything in it’s place…

There’s a nice, short review of one of the tracks on it, Jacknuggeted, along with links to the video here. (Link dead – updated to point to youtube vid – 14/08/2010)

I’m starting to be really glad I decided to finally bite the bullet and get a page up and running. It’s not like I expect anything particularly incredible to happen with it, the signal to noise ration is near insurmountable – but it’s just good to be able to write down the things that are happening in your world, and be able to share them with any and everyone who but happens to look this way…

It also stops me hanging around on street corners outside Spar ’till all hours, and that can only be A Good Thing.

Yeah. Stuff. Love it or loathe it, hoard or abhor it (echo), the world has a lot of, for lack of a better word, stuff. And some of it is deeply, deeply desirable – invoking an almost hypnotic sense of “Gimme!”. For such a broad stroke, I thought a new topic was in order, aptly titled “Consumer Whore” – this’ll be the banner under which most review/want/hate type rants get slung.

Today, I will be mostly consumer whoring PS2 games… I don’t know if it’s just that time of year, or some kinda of strange multi-tiered coincidence, but there’s been and is a fair old number of great games out/coming out soon.

– Killzone
Never a huge fan of FPS’s on consoles since the mouse/key combo is the only way to fly, Kill Zone does however look like it could be very, very, very good. And it sounds, aurally, fantastic.

– PES4
Everyone should own a footy game, even if you’re not a big fan of the sport (like myself), when done right they can be a lot of fun, especially multiplayer. And afterall, that’s what it’s all about.

Add this to some back-catalogue titles I always keep promising myself I’ll pick up at some stage (Futurama, Rez, Jak II etc), and I’ll be damned if I’m not turning into the veritable green-eyed monster!

Maybe I should make an effort to cut it out. It really means nothing to me. I could stop playing Burnout 3 anytime I want… it’s not like I have to get every single crashbreaker, or those custom take-downs ticked off, or super-pimped custom cars with exactly the right speed and inertia/handling ratio or get Gold in every GP…

Things that are down:
– 3 out of 4 opponents in my squash league, won 5-0 today.
– Got the “favourites” site icon back. Petty, inconsequential and true.
– Changed Bloggage topic icon to something other than me gurning. Bravo!
– Mini-me’d and doctored a version of the site logo and threw it into the AvantGo script. Now all I need is a palm-pilot.
– StatCounter now back in action after slipping the javascript code into the footer. Don’t really want to use the PHP-Nuke
statistics module since it’s just overhead on the MySQL DB, and it’s slow enough as it stands.
– My Slashdot rss news feed, proper banned for 72 hours. Apparently despite setting it to refresh once an hour it’s been
banned for polling more than once every half-hour. Deleted and re-added, hopefully it’ll sort itself out or I’ll have to join
Slashdot in giving it the slapdown.

Things to go:

– Hopefully not a tooth which is feeling ever so slightly wobbly. I’m desperately trying not to play with it with my tongue and
then then keep realising that that’s exactly what I’m doing.
– 2 more days in work until it’s the sweet, sweet weekend.
– About half of Doom 3, damn that’s one scary-ass game with the lights down and the sound up!
– Almost 300 pages of PHP-Nuke manual, on p219.
– Me. To bed. Sleepy, and tomorrow is another day in the Core…

Yup, a day in the Core’s like a day on the farm; every meal is a banquet, every paycheck a fortune!

Now have my (semi)righteous logo well in place, and am starting to understand how different types of themes are put together. This one, 3D-Fantasy, is about to get some serious overhaul since I’ve grabbed and renamed all the links to point into my own theme directory. All works through dynamically generated HTML table definitions to put the nice borders around articles with ver/horiz lines, corner-peices et-al.

Simple concept and quite spiffy, really.

Next things on the list to get the mod treatment:
– Jazzing up the header and footer
– Custom box-gfx
– Custom topic icons
– Quote of the day in PHP

Next fixes to bang head against:
– Forum session-cookie fix
– Times of posts don’t get submitted, or get submitted but are not displayed.

Hopefully in the next week or two it’ll come to a point where the site administration is all sorted out and I can focus more on content that just getting the site up and running. Which’ll be nice.

On a completely unrelated note, I’ve got my third game in the work Squash league tomorrow, and since I’ve never attached a poll to an article before, I may as well give it a whirl, if just to see if it works or if PHP hemorrhages all over the place =)

Work on the site’s been continuing behind the scenes; slowly but surely PHP-Nuke is unveiling it’s secrets and settings… Although it doesn’t look like a great deal’s changed, I’m up to page 205 of the 512 page PHP-Nuke: Management and Programming manual.

And that’s got to count for something, right?

I’m still having some problems with cookies when I try to get forums up and running because of some “header already sent” PHP caching stuff. After googling around I’ve found multiple solutions; unfortunately none of them seem to work. Early days.

On the plus side, grabbing the Slashdot rss news feed is working just fine as you can see should you let your eyes drift slightly to the left.

Been reading about the directory structure of the PHP-Nuke installation and realising there’s a ton of stuff I don’t/won’t need and can strike from the server saving precious hostage space for blackjack. And hookers. All the multi-language files are right out the window for a start.

If I wanted to run my page in Hungarian, Indonesian, Arabic or Slovak I’d be doing it already!

After a hard evening playing Burnout 3 and wrestling with web-page based angst, sometimes a man needs a little something to relax. And tonight, a glass of milk, a tab, and some Sigur Ros tuneage just really hits the spot.

Should you be that way inclined, try untitled #4 (a.k.a. njósnavélin / the nothing song) from the media section, and enjoy your flight…